The History of Great Things by Elizabeth Crane Page A

your life in general. Your worldview is perilously close to being fixed on Life Is a Series of Events Specifically Designed to Fuck with Your Head. That’s a worldview, right? You’re from New York. What else would it be?
    â€”I think this might be true, but I might be conflating your worldview with mine.
    â€”There’s some overlap, Mom. Or there is at this time, anyway.
    Unfortunately, it’s difficult to have this conversation with the person you most want to have it with. It’s obviously not reasonable to suggest to Nina that she’s doing this to hurt you, getting married, but what you can’t quite work out for yourself is how she can’t anticipate your needs about the whole thing. It doesn’t help right now that Nina’s worldview is, in essence, the opposite of yours. She believes deeply in prevailing goodness. So when you propose to her that these events are being designed with nefarious, Betsy-sabotaging purposes, and she asks who it is that might be designing them, your response is a simple one. God , you tell her. I didn’t know you believed in god , she says. I don’t, really , you say. You both can’t help but giggle, but you’re going to stick with it. That makes no sense , Nina says. It makes perfect sense! How does that make any sense? I don’t know exactly, it’s just what I think. Maybe something happened in a past life where I did believe in god, and then something shitty happened and I stopped believing in god, and even though I don’t remember any of this now, the god I once believed in is punishing me now. Nina laughs. Don’t laugh! You both laugh. Don’t laugh, I’m not kidding! Okay, I believe you, I believe you, but it still doesn’t make sense. Don’t tell me what makes sense! God isn’t about what makes sense, everyone knows that. Betsy, come on. Listen to what you’re saying. It’s what I think. It is what you think. It is really what you think, and you’re going to stick with it for a while.
    At this point, you’ve been to a whole lot of weddings. You’ve been to weddings at the Plaza and the Pierre, outdoor weddings overlooking the Hudson, backyard weddings on Long Island,church weddings in the Bronx and temple weddings in Queens, Buddhist weddings in Vermont, interfaith weddings in people’s living rooms, and weddings at City Hall. The obvious and logical conclusion is that it’s not all that hard to find a partner, for everyone in the world besides you, and the sub-conclusion is that there is something deeply and irreversibly wrong with you. This is further evidenced by the fact that you are almost never invited with a date. It doesn’t occur to you that this is largely because you almost never have a boyfriend. What does occur to you is that everyone who knows you probably thinks you can’t even get a date. This is on the growing list of Things Being Done to You. You believe that you should be invited with a date either way, whether you can get one or have one or don’t want one at all. You have no idea who you would even bring, but every single time a fat white envelope arrives in the mailbox (and it’s hard not to notice that they’re getting bigger and fatter and more in-your-face than ever; undoubtedly the wedding industry is on the board of the Betsy-sabotaging conspiracy) without “and Guest” after “Betsy Crane,” you can read the invisible calligraphy that reads instead “Who Has No One.” What’s crazy is that you like weddings, in theory, but lately the main thing on your mind, as one bride after another walks down the aisle, is that it isn’t you.
    You come in with no idea of what being a maid of honor entails. Nina’s not really sure either. The wedding is mostly being planned by her future mother-in-law, who gives you a list: wedding-day duties include keeping track of Nina’s wedding-related